It sounds made up—until you read the documents, see the photos, and talk to the people who were there.
A new exposé by the National Post in Canada has revealed a covert program at St. Joseph’s Hospital in London, Ontario, where puppies are used in disturbing cardiac experiments that many scientists now call outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.
Security footage shows puppies arriving in unmarked vans, hidden beneath blankets, before being wheeled into a locked facility known by insiders as the “secret sixth floor.” There, researchers induce up to three-hour-long heart attacks in the dogs. After imaging the damaged organs using the same PET and MRI machines used for human patients, the dogs are euthanized, their hearts removed, and their bodies stored in barrels until disposal. Their names marked include Croissant, Toast, Rye and Bagel.
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The program is publicly funded, approved under Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) protocols, and legally sanctioned. But critics say that’s no longer enough.
Canada has no federal law governing the ethical treatment of animals in scientific research. We experimented on bunnies held in the Zoology building at the University of Toronto during undergrad and were told that there were ethics guidelines in place.
The CCAC provides guidelines but lacks enforcement power. In fact, the agency admitted to the IJB that it has only revoked certification once in the past eight years and does not conduct ethical reviews of individual studies.
At St. Joseph’s, hospital officials argue that the use of dogs is still necessary to model human cardiac injury.
Only 13 dogs from the program have been rehomed in over a decade, hospital officials admit.
In a country where animal experimentation is largely hidden from public view, this investigation has peeled back a curtain that many would rather keep closed. Whether the outrage sparks change—or is buried with the bodies—remains to be seen.
